Noelle August - Boomerang

I tear my gaze away and murmur, “Good question.” But I don’t know what I want except to stop sitting here, burning with curiosity and miserable at seeing Ethan with another girl. Even a girl whose company he clearly does not enjoy. “I guess I just want to be . . . I don’t know. Authentic?”

Nervous about tipping into dangerous territory, I gulp the last of my drink. “I just want to be able to look at a person and say, ‘I want you.’ Or ‘I really like you so much.’ It’s like none of us—not me, not any of my friends, no one I know, will ever just put themselves out there and say, ‘I want to be with you.’ We’re all scared of giving up the power of being the person who cares less.”

“Well, that’s—” Brian begins, though what can he really say to that?

Ethan slides out of the booth and stands. He snaps open his wallet and throws several bills on the table. When he turns away, his eyes lock onto mine, and there’s something so sad and tortured in them that I actually gasp.

“What’s wrong?” Brian asks, alarmed.

“Nothing. Just . . . My, um, colleague seems upset.”

Ethan stalks past me, and I’m shocked to see the girl—the Ice Queen—rise and rush after him. Only, as she passes, I can see her face is blotchy and that tears glitter in her eyes.

“What the hell is going on?” I half hear myself say.

“Lovers’ quarrel?” Brian suggests.

But that’s impossible. They’ve never seen each other before.

Have they?

Ethan

Q: Do you forgive and forget, or hold a grudge?

Alison follows me outside.

“Ethan, what’s going on?”

The tone of her voice is so familiar, it sends chills down my spine. I should keep walking. I don’t owe her a fucking thing. But she’s so confused. Something’s not right about this. About her being here tonight.

I stop. “Did you plan this, Alison?”

“No. I thought you did.” She appears in front of me, but I keep my eyes on the passing cars. A parking valet across the street catches a set of keys in the air and jogs around the corner.

“I only got your name a few minutes ago,” she says. “I got a message with the details for the date. I thought someone was playing a joke on me at first when I saw your name. Then I started to hope you’d finally decided to talk to me.”

I look at her for the first time. She’s beautiful. It was the first thing I noticed about her years ago, and she hasn’t changed. She’s beautiful the way an icicle is. Cool and sharp. Not half as fragile as she appears to be.

I swallow and draw a breath and swallow again, trying to figure out what the hell to say.

“So you came here to meet someone else,” I say, and suddenly I’m fighting back images of Alison sitting on her bed in her bra, sheets tangled around her, eating takeout Chinese food with another guy. Since that night, she’s called and texted me a hundred times. I managed to avoid her. I thought it was over. Until now. “I can’t say that surprises me.”

Alison winces. “Ethan—” She pushes her long blonde hair behind her ear. “I don’t know how this happened. I promise you, it wasn’t something I did. But I’ve been wanting to see you so much. And if you’ll just give me a chance, and listen to me . . .”

She falls quiet, wrapping her arms around herself.

A remote part of my mind finds this interesting. Alison doesn’t get nervous or flustered. In situations where she should be nervous, she becomes ruthless. Lethal. She’s like a snake that way.

The valet pops up beside us, out of breath and smiling, his bowtie crooked. “Are you two waiting for your car?”

Alison looks at him. “No,” she says. One word but it packs a punch. There’s the girl I know.

The valet retreats so fast he practically sends up sparks on the pavement. Then we’re alone again.

“Are you dating, E?” she asks, throwing me off. “I guess you are, if you’re using Boomerang.”

I shake my head. “No. I work there. This is work for me. These dates.”

“Oh.” Alison actually looks relieved. Her arms loosen around her stomach. “Me too. I work for my dad now. I’m looking into Boomerang for him. He’s thinking about becoming an investor.”

Alison’s father is an investment banker and he’s loaded. Big-time loaded. He makes Adam look like a pauper.

I know I should be considering what she’s saying strategically. I could bring Adam some inside intelligence. But all I can think is that I told this girl that I loved her.

What a fucking idiot. I didn’t love her. I loved the fun we had together. I loved the vacations we took. I loved having a girl that every guy wanted on my arm. And at the year mark, if you don’t say those words, something’s not right. Which it wasn’t. But I said them anyway. Now I wish I could take them back. The fact that I gave them to her so carelessly pisses me off.

A breeze sweeps past us. Alison’s shoulders give a small shiver. It’s a cool night, but I don’t feel it. I don’t feel anything right now except the desire to leave.

“Ethan . . . I haven’t seen anyone since you.”

“I don’t care what you do, Alison. I stopped caring when I found you in bed with Carl.”

“Craig.”

“Don’t care.”

“I messed up. I know I did. And I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

I draw in a deep breath and hold it, trying to let the rational part of my mind weigh in. What I want is for this to end, so I form an answer that will get me there.

“Okay, Alison. You said it. You can go on with a clear conscience now.”

“That’s not what I’m trying to do. We spent two years together, Ethan. Most of it was amazing. If this is the way it ends for us, then we’re throwing away all that time. And I guess—I guess I want to see if we can salvage some of it. I don’t mean get back together. Not that I think we would—or that you’d consider it after what I did. But it’s like all that time never happened. And I don’t like the way it feels to regret so much.”

I’ve had the same thought a number of times. For a while, I was constantly having to edit my past to remove references to her. Anything could trigger a memory I didn’t want. The smell of cinnamon reminded me of the holidays with her—Alison always dusts her coffee with it. Other times it was Jason and Isis breaking off in the middle of a story—something the four of us had done together. Even flipping channels, seeing a glimpse of sport fishing, surfing, kayaking, reminded me of the trips I took with her family.

It hasn’t been as intense lately, since summer. Since Boomerang. Not by a long shot. But I do get what she’s saying. I know how it feels to want to erase your past so it’s not there for you to hate. What I’m not clear on is what she’s asking for.

“What do you want, Alison?” I ask. “For us to be friends? Is that it?”

Hope flickers in her blue eyes. “I don’t know, exactly. I’d like a chance to remake us. I screwed up, Ethan. And I guess I just don’t want to lose everything.”

Mia

Q: What scares you?

Light blazes from every window of my parents’ house, and the front door stands wide open to the night. A sharp blast of adrenaline punches my solar plexus. I leap from the car and run toward the house without really knowing for sure that I stopped the car or turned off the engine.

“Nana?” I call as I cross the threshold and hurry through the front hall.

I rush through the house, calling to her, starting with her room, which looks as though it’s been ransacked. Bureau drawers are pulled out, some even onto the floor. Her closet stands open with piles of clothes puddled beneath pristine satin hangers. Books lie scattered on the floor, and I almost trip on an overturned teacup. But she’s not there. Nor is she in my mom’s studio, any of the three bathrooms, or in my pop’s workshop downstairs.

“Nana! Come on,” I call to her, opening and closing the doors of every guest room and of the darkened media space with its half-dozen plush leather recliners and wall-wide movie screen. Everything feels lifeless, empty. I shudder as I head outside through the back door. Foreboding weighs on me, slowing my steps, giving my movements a dreamy sluggish feel.

The palm trees circling the dark garden twinkle with ropes of fairy lights, but they hit me as cloying and artificial, not sexy and festive as they normally do.

I stand there in the hush of night and peer into the shadows, listening.

“Nana?” I whisper, and my voice lifts onto the suddenly stirring breeze. My throat pinches as I shift through the shadows, toward the edge of the property, which drops off steeply down to the canyon below.

A sound off to my left halts me. Branches cracking underfoot. I follow it, sprinting around the koi pond and squeezing through the narrow gap between two poplars to move around the side of the house.

There I find Nana wandering through the yard in her nightgown and robe. The satin sash dangles from a nearby bush, twisting in the evening breeze.

My relief makes me want to ball up and vomit. It also makes me want to punch something in the face.

“Nana, Jesus.” I rush across the lawn to her. “What are you doing?”

She doesn’t spare me a look, just keeps wandering across the yard, red hair glowing the color of blood in the hazy moonlight.

I’m late, I know, but my parents can’t have been gone for more than forty minutes. What happened here? How did she get in this state?

Gently, terrified of frightening her, I tug at the sleeve of her robe. “Nana?”

“Don’t just stand there,” she demands. “Help me find it.”